VIDEOS BY SADIE BENNING
The reason may be other cultural developments that Astruc couldn’t foresee. For one thing, written language has itself suffered a precipitous decline over the same 43-year period. (The corresponding decline in literacy is apparent to anyone who has ever read student papers.) For another, new technologies by no means guarantee new aesthetics or ideologies; on the contrary, despite an avalanche of economically motivated hype telling us the sky’s the limit, to date new technologies have mainly meant either a brutal reinforcement of old Hollywood codes and models or the foreclosure of certain options (such as the use of black and white). Maybe in theory the sky is the limit; but in practice and in the broader marketplace, the menu of choices is conceivably narrower now than it’s ever been.
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Benning is the daughter of experimental independent filmmaker James Benning, whose best-known works include 11 x 14 (1976), One Way Boogie Woogie (1977), Grand Opera (1979), and Landscape Suicide (1987). She made her first video, New Year, when she was 15, with a cheap plastic video camera–a Fisher-Price Pixelvision 2000–that her father gave her for Christmas; all her subsequent videos have been made with this same toy camera, in her working-class, racially mixed neighborhood. I’m told that both her father and Eric Saks (Forevermore: Biography of a Leach Lord) have also done some video work with the same kind of camera, but her work bears very little resemblance to the films by James Benning and Saks I’ve seen. (The Fisher-Price Pixelvision camera–which cost about $100 and used audiotape instead of videotape–has since been taken off the market. So much for the enlarged freedoms that new technologies are supposed to bestow automatically, like gifts from heaven.)
She begins by taping a bit of a TV program–the end of a commercial for Raisin Bran followed by two fragments of a frenetic game show. Abruptly the image freezes; her camera moves back and forth across a “New York” pennant on a wall, then scans two lines of a written text that we can’t make out and, to the accompaniment of rock music, several headlines from a tabloid newspaper, zooming in briefly on the word “super-nerd.”
“Last week I almost laughed,” she says in If Every Girl Had a Diary. “It’s only been a year ago that I crawled the walls. . . . You know, I’ve been waiting for the day to come when I could walk the streets. People would look at me and say, ‘That’s a dyke.’ And if they didn’t like it, they’d fall into the center of the earth and deal with themselves. Maybe they’d return, but they’d respect me.”
